Lisp as defined in Chapter 1 (pages 1-14) of the Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual; that is to say, a very simple Lisp language, which should, I believe, be sufficient in conjunction with the functions provided by beowulf.host, be sufficient to bootstrap the full Lisp 1.5 interpreter..

The fundamental cons cell on which all Lisp structures are built. Lisp 1.5 lists do not necessarily have a sequence as their CDR, so cannot be implemented on top of Clojure lists.

Essentially, the -main function and the bootstrap read-eval-print loop.

provides Lisp 1.5 functions which can’t be (or can’t efficiently be) implemented in Lisp 1.5, which therefore need to be implemented in the host language, in this case Clojure.

This provides the reader required for boostrapping. It’s not a bad reader - it provides feedback on errors found in the input - but it isn’t the real Lisp reader.